Curse

wuzzman · Jan 20, 2008, 08:55 PM // 20:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ec]-[oMaN

Thanks you just acknowledged that their was at least bar variations

.

I acknowledged shit, SoR was the best flag runner build in the game before it was nerfed and its only real weakness that ganking with a SoR ele is really clumsy compared to the rt/d and monk runners players could run at the time. The fact that most teams ran SoR should tell you that ganking wasn't barely a tactic during the lod age and it became like that for so long that when teams did run 3 man splits with a monk in the gank team a lot of teams didn't even know what to do for a while. DA para is arguable was more redundantly defensive then SoP Paras considering that at the time players ran DA most teams had their flag runner carry aegis along with the 2 stand monks and a ward.....Cruel Spear was saw brief play when teams power leaked DA every time the Para tried.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ibreaktoilets

DF run a HP flagger for a start.
The difference between before and after is that you weren't forced into taking a certain midline before.

DF ran HP flagger only when teams didn't even know wtf to do now that LoD was nerfed it saw VERY brief play.....

Tab · Jan 20, 2008, 09:00 PM // 21:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

DF ran HP flagger only when teams didn't even know wtf to do now that LoD was nerfed it saw VERY brief play.....

DF were running a HP flagger 2 days ago. Try again.

wuzzman · Jan 20, 2008, 09:06 PM // 21:06

does that make HP Flagger runners meta? no. (besides what shitty teams let you get away with HP flagger runners...)

Tab · Jan 20, 2008, 09:07 PM // 21:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

does that make HP Flagger runners meta? no. (besides what shitty teams let you get away with HP flagger runners...)

Does it mean that they are still run and are pretty necesarry without a SoR para? Yes.

Ec]-[oMaN · Jan 20, 2008, 09:09 PM // 21:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

I acknowledged shit, SoR was the best flag runner build in the game before it was nerfed and its only real weakness that ganking with a SoR ele is really clumsy compared to the rt/d and monk runners players could run at the time. The fact that most teams ran SoR should tell you that ganking wasn't barely a tactic during the lod age and it became like that for so long that when teams did run 3 man splits with a monk in the gank team a lot of teams didn't even know what to do for a while. DA para is arguable was more redundantly defensive then SoP Paras considering that at the time players ran DA most teams had their flag runner carry aegis along with the 2 stand monks and a ward.....Cruel Spear was saw brief play when teams power leaked DA every time the Para tried.

Seriously where's your point, just reinforcing what I've already mentioned. Cruel spear saw tons of play, packed mirror and power spike, again bar variation, some went /W. SOR ran out of play since one war started packing rend touch then rits came into play, weapon spells you couldn't remove while packing aoe for vod. Tell us something we don't know. Still doesn't change the fact that right now gvg is static as hell with no real room to make alternative build choices.

Vanquisher · Jan 21, 2008, 10:50 AM // 10:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

I acknowledged shit, SoR was the best flag runner build in the game before it was nerfed and its only real weakness that ganking with a SoR ele is really clumsy compared to the rt/d and monk runners players could run at the time.

You are wrong.

Kaon · Jan 21, 2008, 04:19 PM // 16:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by ibreaktoilets

DF were running a HP flagger 2 days ago. Try again.

People in general have been running monk and ele flaggers with hp very often since lod nerf. I've seen countless of them. It's pretty decent as in vod you go 5-3 so splinter is useless.

I've got countless nice build ideas and always have, but my guilds never try them :/. I wonder what the effect of dual mesmer/surge would be this meta, with everyone stacking up, the damage buffed, and ward being up only half the time. While the monks cant really prot themselves except with guardian (which you thankfully wont get off with a mesmer on you).

Lordhelmos · Jan 21, 2008, 07:44 PM // 19:44

I've seen attempts at Mo/E glyph runners with healers boon, heal party, and storm djnn's haste. However, I just don't think that any other build can cover the utility of the Rt/D meta flagger. Only because of the convience of not having to cramp splinter weapon and ancestor's rage on an ele, weapon of remedy to stop themselves from being ganked by a cripshot (or Icy Shackles in Rawr's case, for added snares). That Rt has a hell of alot of survivability and meshes well with splits. I don't really see any other runners matching it's versatility.

What I have been seeing is EC spike being run on the mesmer as an option other aside from MoR, Esurge, or HeV. I was up against team that guest some of you DF guys and your mesmer was running Enchanters Conundrum and a ward. He was camping our warriors with Shatter+EC+Shattered Delusions once frenzy went up for insta-kills (It might have been Ensign, since The Savage Cheater was on their team, but I couldn't remember if he was playing mez or not). That spike is pretty fast and can drop unwary warriors (like I was at the time) in less than 2 seconds. It made me think of the spike as less of a gimmick and more of an option for turning the pressure tables by suddenly exploding front line melee. Eitherway, we didn't last long that game. (488 frenzy damage = pwnt)

I think that kind of utility meshes better than running a dual surger lineup. Putting two mesmers on a team without running ineptitude is really going to mess with your ability to split. Unless you are running a paragon for party healing, the party survivability with two unsplittable mesmers is going to be pretty low. Throw that paragon in there and then your ability to split becomes pretty much nil. That kind of build is asking for a base gank.

Eitherway, the defensive needs of the current meta make a build like dual surgers incredibly hard to play. There really isn't any room to make defensive sacrifices without gimping your whole team, which is one of the issues of this discussion. Balance of the game shouldn't mean that all teams are forced to run slight variations of the same build exo-skeleton. Any builds that aren't as such are pretty much dedicated splits that give away the strategy as early as the flagstand. That and such teams are going to have a much harder time at VoD without the health gimp and the reduced importance of NPC's.

But then in any GvG, regardless of how defensive your team is, simple mistakes can still costs games (such as letting some lone ele pull the catapult and bomb all your npcs /doh!)

Captain Robo · Jan 21, 2008, 10:32 PM // 22:32

At VoD, put a cap on the ability of blocking skills at 25%

Natty Stride, Aegis, any blocking skill: reduced to 25% at VoD.

Makes the fight against blockway until VoD worth fighting, and gimps the effectiveness of blockway at VoD.

In this way, teams will be rewarded for surviving, and blockway will be less appealing to run, but still viable. Isn't that what BALANCE is about?

Also, quit spraining your panties about runner issues. The best runner build ever was the E/Rt water runner- end of story.

This didn't last forever thtough, as a metagame shift favored more high-powered offense on splits; so better healing was needed. LoD was already on the mainline, which made HP elementalists extraneous, but your average E/Rt just couldn't provide the healing that most splits needed. SoR was the next best thing at that point, but now it's a bad choice to run because party healing is vital.

Yes, I know, its horrible that runners now have to gimp themselves by bringing party healing. It really sucks that the devs just spat in the face of competitive play and forced an old mechanic back into the metagame, regardless of what the modern trend was. However, this is the way it is.

Your runner issues are boiled down to basically four things:

E/Mo HP spammer, just like the good ol' days.
Rt/x with a random toolbox of effects and decent party healing with PWK
Mo/x with skills that attempt to fill in the giant hole left by LoD. HB-HP or ZB/SoR take your pick.
X/X which is worse than the above three.

Guild Wars has been reduced to 2008 teams with 2005-era runners. Doesn't it suck?

langola · Jan 22, 2008, 01:49 AM // 01:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain Robo

At VoD, put a cap on the ability of blocking skills at 25%

Natty Stride, Aegis, any blocking skill: reduced to 25% at VoD.

Makes the fight against blockway until VoD worth fighting, and gimps the effectiveness of blockway at VoD.

You dont want to nerf the good block skills, such as guardian and natty stride.

nerfing things like natural stride will make splitting at vod a lot harder, and nerfing single target prots is bad.

erk · Jan 22, 2008, 01:52 AM // 01:52

Reduce all the multi-target block skills to 33% chance of block, that means Aegis, Ward Against Melee, Defensive Anthem, Shields Up, Protectors Defense, and Displacement. That should increase damage to pressure the healers a bit more.

Yue · Jan 22, 2008, 05:09 AM // 05:09

Quote:

DF ran HP flagger only when teams didn't even know wtf to do now that LoD was nerfed it saw VERY brief play.....

Pretty sure we ran HP a few times only after LoD was nerfed.

Quote:

DA para is arguable was more redundantly defensive then SoP Paras considering that at the time players ran DA most teams had their flag runner carry aegis along with the 2 stand monks and a ward.....Cruel Spear was saw brief play when teams power leaked DA every time the Para tried.

That a joke? Do you even play this game?

Quote:

That spike is pretty fast and can drop unwary warriors (like I was at the time) in less than 2 seconds. It made me think of the spike as less of a gimmick and more of an option for turning the pressure tables by suddenly exploding front line melee.

No, it's definitely a gimmick.

Kaon · Jan 22, 2008, 10:36 AM // 10:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain Robo

"blockway"bash

WHAT IS BLOCKWAY???!!!!!

explain.

Neo-LD · Jan 22, 2008, 01:50 PM // 13:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by erk

Reduce all the multi-target block skills to 33% chance of block, that means Aegis, Ward Against Melee, Defensive Anthem, Shields Up, Protectors Defense, and Displacement. That should increase damage to pressure the healers a bit more.

I would agree, but the need for defense wouldnt magically go away. Its already been discussed that nerfing defense would just cause defense webs to tighten even more, reducing the slots for offense in any given build, and making the problem worse. Thus buffing monks or nerfing paragon damage would be good steps in reducing the necessity of the blockweb.

That said, Blockwebs arent all that hard to turn off if you play well... they just arent a desirable form of gameplay in the first place. They arent really imbalanced in any significant way, just distasteful.

Captain Robo · Jan 22, 2008, 02:55 PM // 14:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kaon

WHAT IS BLOCKWAY???!!!!!

explain.

Blockway is any low offense/high defense build containing multiple copies of any combination of Aegis, DA, and/or Wards, which is designed to bore you and your team to tears until VoD.

At which point the blockway team grows some balls and wins the game.

You know what? It's almost identical to 'balanced' these days, except for the fact that it aims to win at VoD, instead of any time before it.

Also, I believe that's enough wuzzman bashing for one thread. If I wanted to see endless flaming I'd just go to 4chan.

Lorekeeper · Jan 22, 2008, 03:35 PM // 15:35

for me blockway is just a short and convenient label for a very general and persistent type of build which has cropped up ever since Nightfall... it all started with the melandru dervish era.

before the LoD nerf 'blockway' manifested itself with radar wide aegis chains, very powerful party heal, very powerful SoD, and a highly difficult to interrupt MoR ward mesmer and sometimes a DA paragon with shields up (but back then we had no magebane to interrupt through aegis/shields

post-LoD nerf the 'blockway' has changed slightly, instead of MoR ward you got gole ward mesmers, u still got gole aegis chains at the start, buffed single target heals like WoH, motigons with party heals and mending refrain, and sometimes shields up.

The common themes to 'blockway' are reliable ward against melees (reliable in the sense that they are hard to interrupt) and reliable gole aegis chains, and either medium party healing+strong single target heals (woh+rc) or strong party healing and strong single target prots (lod+sod). Only even in this current medium party heal+ strong single target heal era we still have medium strength single target prots with guardian seeing much more play.

I guess my idea of ideal gameplay would be to encourage use of active prots like guardian and sod... discourage the use of wider reaching defenses like wards and aegis. Better party healing would unfortunately be a necessary evil in active prot dominated gameplay, however i would much prefer gameplay of this type rather than gameplay with weaker party heals but stronger passive defenses.

I would prefer it because effective use of active prot is not easy, so it will encourage teams to improve. At least with active defense gameplay team wipes do not necessarily result from the interrupt of a key skill... nor will they always occur with the diversioning of a key skill. The problem with passive defense gameplay is that the entire defensive web is like a fragile latice, pull out one strand and the rest falls apart (avoidable only by extremely defensive play like both your warriors linebackling sacrificing good flagstand position). With active defense gameplay each individual mode of defense is stronger, and even if 1 or 2 are disabled the remaining few, if applied correctly, would prevent catastrophic team wipes. The emphasis is on the correct application of defense rather than passive defense gameplay where this matters less.

This is not to say that active defense gameplay will result in zero deaths or team wipes... the whole benefit of active gameplay is that it rewards excellent active play. You cannot just throw around active defense where its not needed, and on the other side of the coin, it is perfectly possible to direct dmg where active defense doesnt appear.

Basically from my perspective the whole 'blockway' debate revolves around the debate between passive and active play. Blockway metas are represented by increased dependance on passive defense and with builds becoming ever more anchored to the flag stand as a result, which forces flag stand gameplay around the disruption of that passive defense and neglects skirmish type gameplay too... which is far more boring and stale because the modes of passive defense and the methods to disrupt them are limited... gameplay that revolves around dealing with strong active forms of defense can be far more diverse (if old nerfs are reverted) because there are far more active skills in the game than there are passive, not to mention that active play is not entirely focused on the interaction of skills themselves but by actions of players too. Pushing builds away from skirmish style play is also a disaster in terms of interesting and diverse gameplay.

Neo-LD · Jan 22, 2008, 04:35 PM // 16:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lorekeeper

I guess my idea of ideal gameplay would be to encourage use of active prots like guardian and sod... discourage the use of wider reaching defenses like wards and aegis. Better party healing would unfortunately be a necessary evil in active prot dominated gameplay, however i would much prefer gameplay of this type rather than gameplay with weaker party heals but stronger passive defenses.

I would prefer it because effective use of active prot is not easy, so it will encourage teams to improve. At least with active defense gameplay team wipes do not necessarily result from the interrupt of a key skill... nor will they always occur with the diversioning of a key skill. The problem with passive defense gameplay is that the entire defensive web is like a fragile latice, pull out one strand and the rest falls apart (avoidable only by extremely defensive play like both your warriors linebackling sacrificing good flagstand position). With active defense gameplay each individual mode of defense is stronger, and even if 1 or 2 are disabled the remaining few, if applied correctly, would prevent catastrophic team wipes. The emphasis is on the correct application of defense rather than passive defense gameplay where this matters less.

This is not to say that active defense gameplay will result in zero deaths or team wipes... the whole benefit of active gameplay is that it rewards excellent active play. You cannot just throw around active defense where its not needed, and on the other side of the coin, it is perfectly possible to direct dmg where active defense doesnt appear.

Basically from my perspective the whole 'blockway' debate revolves around the debate between passive and active play. Blockway metas are represented by increased dependance on passive defense and with builds becoming ever more anchored to the flag stand as a result, which forces flag stand gameplay around the disruption of that passive defense and neglects skirmish type gameplay too... which is far more boring and stale because the modes of passive defense and the methods to disrupt them are limited... gameplay that revolves around dealing with strong active forms of defense can be far more diverse (if old nerfs are reverted) because there are far more active skills in the game than there are passive, not to mention that active play is not entirely focused on the interaction of skills themselves but by actions of players too. Pushing builds away from skirmish style play is also a disaster in terms of interesting and diverse gameplay.

Well said, nicely done.

I think that at this point, the argument between active play and passive play, if there ever was one, is over. Everyone interested in promoting interesting, competitive, and meaningful play agrees that active play is more desirable, and has been saying so for quite some time. The key now is actually doing something to move the game in that direction. I think there have been several good suggestions in this thread already, but then again, there have been good suggestions around for months, if not years, so lets just say that my faith in Anet to come through for us is pretty low atm.

zling · Jan 22, 2008, 04:41 PM // 16:41

the problem is not blockway. there are plenty of skills that counter it.
the problem is the close mindness of most people and the trend to copy builds off each other(and wiki) resulting in everyone running the same super defensive build and thus getting stuck until VoD.

Ghostly Weapon, Seeking Arrows, Anthem of Guidance, Magebane Shot, Magehunter Strike, Golden Fox Strike->Wild Strike->Shattering Assault, Expose Defenses and Rigor Mortis are just some examples of skills that let you bypass blockway.

there are also skills that bring the enchantments in blockway down easily:
your regular enchantments strippers, along with HEV and Rending Touch

also, remember that only melee attacks can be blocked, spells always get through!

now lets assume you completely ignored the list of anti block skills, even without them you can still beat blockway. get rid of enchantment based blocks, like Aegis, Guardian, SoD, etc.
now the only problem remains DA and Ward vs Melee.
when facing DA Paragorns you should target their melee chars and the Paragorn itself as they're DA wont stick as they gotta attack...
as for Ward vs Melee. its main problem is that everyone needs to stay inside the Ward to be protected from it. so you what you should do is this:
target everyone who is outside the Ward range. if everyone is cramped tightly inside the Ward than nuke them, yes NUKE!
a Mind Blaster ele is perfect for this. either on the Runner or another char. Savannah Heat also works wonders.
punish them with AoE dmg that cant be blocked, to force them out of their Ward and into your meleers.
if you really dislike nukers in PvP(no reason to but meh) than at the very least bring a Dervish and equip your Rit/D Runner with Ghostly weapon along with Splinter. now this Dervish will be able to deal a lot of dmg to the cramped ppl in the Ward, not as much as nuking and only adjacent but still good enough...

there you go, the complete guide to beat blockway.
enjoy :P

pah01 · Jan 22, 2008, 04:46 PM // 16:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lorekeeper

I guess my idea of ideal gameplay would be to encourage use of active prots like guardian and sod... discourage the use of wider reaching defenses like wards and aegis. Better party healing would unfortunately be a necessary evil in active prot dominated gameplay, however i would much prefer gameplay of this type rather than gameplay with weaker party heals but stronger passive defenses.

Active prot is great when the majority of damage output is melee. This isn't so much the case any more with paragons able to output a fairly significant chunk of damage by themselves. It isn't exactly easy to follow around a paragon by tracking the position of the enemy paragons. It is not that hard to switch targets as a para either.

If a team is good forcing enemy warriors to target switch with prot will always soak up damage from warriors because of the gap between team members.

Suggestion 1: Rework aggressive refrain so that it isn't a permanent free IAS. The problem with the skill is the fact that its permanent and not that its drawback of cracked armor isn't powerful eneogh.

Suggestion 2: Change the spear attack rate to be the same as a recurve bow. This has the effect of just reducing paragon damage to manageable levels, of course gons still have more dps than rangers due to the fact that I would still think that they would run 14 spear but its not significant pressure any more. The good thing is that PVE players wont notice this.

I think the next problem that needs solving is the ease with which one avoids interrupting with GOLE. I hold my hands up here and say I don't know how this should be done - i just don't think that it should allow you to fake cast at will.

Passive defenses.

Ward Melee.

I would leave this skill alone in its block chance but I would nerf its duration.

For 4..12 seconds party members have a 50% chance to block melee attacks in the area. Recharge 20 seconds.

Aegis Reduce Block chance to 33% is a way to go. But I wouldnt do this with paragons outputting the damage they do.

After these things are done then we can start worrying about solving the problem of party healing and increasing the power of disruption.

Joe

Yue · Jan 22, 2008, 05:34 PM // 17:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by zling

the problem is not blockway. there are plenty of skills that counter it.
the problem is the close mindness of most people and the trend to copy builds off each other(and wiki) resulting in everyone running the same super defensive build and thus getting stuck until VoD.

Ghostly Weapon, Seeking Arrows, Anthem of Guidance, Magebane Shot, Magehunter Strike, Golden Fox Strike->Wild Strike->Shattering Assault, Expose Defenses and Rigor Mortis are just some examples of skills that let you bypass blockway.

there are also skills that bring the enchantments in blockway down easily:
your regular enchantments strippers, along with HEV and Rending Touch

also, remember that only melee attacks can be blocked, spells always get through!

now lets assume you completely ignored the list of anti block skills, even without them you can still beat blockway. get rid of enchantment based blocks, like Aegis, Guardian, SoD, etc.
now the only problem remains DA and Ward vs Melee.
when facing DA Paragorns you should target their melee chars and the Paragorn itself as they're DA wont stick as they gotta attack...
as for Ward vs Melee. its main problem is that everyone needs to stay inside the Ward to be protected from it. so you what you should do is this:
target everyone who is outside the Ward range. if everyone is cramped tightly inside the Ward than nuke them, yes NUKE!
a Mind Blaster ele is perfect for this. either on the Runner or another char. Savannah Heat also works wonders.
punish them with AoE dmg that cant be blocked, to force them out of their Ward and into your meleers.
if you really dislike nukers in PvP(no reason to but meh) than at the very least bring a Dervish and equip your Rit/D Runner with Ghostly weapon along with Splinter. now this Dervish will be able to deal a lot of dmg to the cramped ppl in the Ward, not as much as nuking and only adjacent but still good enough...

there you go, the complete guide to beat blockway.
enjoy :P

Go back to RA.

Quote:

before the LoD nerf 'blockway' manifested itself with radar wide aegis chains, very powerful party heal, very powerful SoD, and a highly difficult to interrupt MoR ward mesmer and sometimes a DA paragon with shields up (but back then we had no magebane to interrupt through aegis/shields

post-LoD nerf the 'blockway' has changed slightly, instead of MoR ward you got gole ward mesmers, u still got gole aegis chains at the start, buffed single target heals like WoH, motigons with party heals and mending refrain, and sometimes shields up.

The main difference with blockway before the LoD nerf was that you could deal with it by fitting enough shutdown and offense to break the defenses of the opposing team. While you're doing that, you would have LoD to keep you alive. After the nerf, you can't really compress party healing onto monks anymore without running a HB, which forces you to run a bsurge. So, by forcing party heals outside of monks, you're forced to essentially run less offense and shutdown, and more defense in order to keep up with the team that does run blockway.

Before LoD nerf, you could win just as well without blockway. It was simply that most teams didn't have the balls to try, or were just too bad from being used to playing under a defense web. It didn't help players improve, and when blockway teams got raped it just presented a better indication of how bad their players were.

After LoD nerf, you need some passive defense just to survive because there is no other skill that does as good a job as LoD does. Even a heal party bot isn't as effective, since it forces you to run the ele, and also the ele is typically the flagger anyway.

Simplest solution is to unnerf LoD, and kill mending refrain. Teams can still run blockway if they want, but other teams would be able to fit more shutdown to deal with it.